Nahal Toosi reports on the latest Iranian move to increase its enrichment above the 3.67% level permitted by the JCPOA. She quotes an administration official who is apparently not joking with us:

“Fundamentally, we want them to stay in the deal,” the U.S. official said, when asked why the Trump administration wants the European financial mechanism, known as INSTEX, to work. There’s no desire to engage in an all-out war with Iran or see it build a nuclear weapon, the official said.

It is extremely difficult to believe anything that administration officials say about Iran and the nuclear deal. This official is quoted as saying that they want Iran to remain in the deal, but everything that the administration has done since at least May 2018 has been aimed at driving them out of the deal. Bolton routinely lies when he says that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons, and he insists that there is no other reason for Iran to be breaching the deal’s limits except to build nuclear weapons. Of course, there is another reason, and that is to pressure the other parties to the agreement to provide Iran with the benefits that it was promised. All top administrations officials and the president denounce the JCPOA in the harshest terms, and they lie that it paves the way to a nuclear weapon, but they are also adamant that Iran mustn’t violate the terms of this “terrible” deal that the administration dishonestly claims gives them nukes. The administration has been deliberately provoking Iran to take the steps they have taken in the last week, and then they try to exploit the reaction caused by their own policy. It is all so heavy-handed and done in such obvious bad faith, but then that has been true of the administration’s Iran policy all along.

One way to make sense of this is to conclude that the administration thinks they can have things both ways: violate all U.S. commitments under the JCPOA, but somehow retain all of the benefits in the form of continued Iranian compliance. That is extremely arrogant and unrealistic, but it would at least account for the mismatch between administration actions and expectations. It was always extremely likely that “maximum pressure” would result in maximum resistance from Iran, and I find it hard to believe that the people that have been wanting to trash the nuclear deal for years didn’t anticipate that. On the contrary, I assume Iran hawks in and around the administration were counting on Iranian resistance to justify their own demands for escalation.

Another explanation is that Iran hawks couldn’t care less about Iranian compliance or violation as such and want to use any excuse they can find to isolate and punish Iran no matter what its government does. When Iran was fully in compliance, the Trump administration waged economic war on them, and now that they have committed some minor, reversible breaches of the agreement the administration is going to wage economic war on them some more. Iran has no incentive to talk to the Trump administration because U.S. policy is to punish and attack Iran regardless of how it behaves. I assume that the Trump administration has never been seriously interested in new negotiations, but wants to keep up the pretense that they are open to talking so that they can spin the predictable Iranian refusal to their advantage. Don’t let them get away with it.

The report refers to Trump’s “eagerness to talk,” but this is misleading. If Trump wants to talk to the Iranian government, he isn’t saying anything worth listening to, and his actions speak far louder than his confused words. If he really wanted to talk, he would first listen to what the Iranian government has said the prerequisite for talks is, namely rejoining the JCPOA and lifting the illegitimate sanctions. Trump’s Iran policy has been suffocating the Iranian economy and inflicting collective punishment on the entire population. Saying that Trump is “eager” to talk to Iran is a bit like saying that a strangler is interested in having a lively conversation with his victim. Trump’s idea of meeting and talking with Iranian leaders amounts to delivering ultimatums to them, so it is no surprise that they don’t want to talk.